CSBG Archive

A Year of Cool Comics – Day 193

Here is the latest in our year-long look at one cool comic (whether it be a self-contained work, an ongoing comic or a run on a long-running title that featured multiple creative teams on it over the years) a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here‘s the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today we look at Adrian Tomine’s “Hawaiian Getaway”…

Enjoy!

Adrian Tomine is an excellent omic book storyteller. Whether he is working with semi-autobiographical stories or with completely fictional ones, Tomine takes you on a journey with the characters, and the most remarkable aspect of the journey is that quite frequently, nothing “major” happens, yet through his fully-realized characters there is an unmistakable sense of progression within the stories.

“Hawaiian Getaway” stars Hillary Chan, a 20-something child of Asian immigrants whose personality we learn about through the process of Tomine splitting the comic into 13 “mini-chapters,” each one detailing a moment in Hillary’s life.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Hillary is that she is NOT a particularly nice person…

And yet, Tomine manages to create something compelling about her – she’s not nice, but she’s not so screwed up that you can’t wonder WHY she got this screwed up and whether she can turn it around…

This story is collected in the Optic Nerve collection “Summer Blonde.” It is a collection of four Optic Nerve issues, each one an issue-length story (the early Optic Nerve issues were collections of shorter stories). Well worth the read.